


what a comet does

by somedaycomesback



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-07
Updated: 2020-10-14
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:54:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26881027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somedaycomesback/pseuds/somedaycomesback
Summary: in which our heroes are miserable (together)
Relationships: Olivia Benson/Elliot Stabler
Comments: 4
Kudos: 11





	1. afterwards

**Author's Note:**

> being very reckless and posting this first chapter before i've finished the full story - but this, my friends, is my favorite thing i've ever written for svu! it's an au which hopefully will speak for itself but the framework will make sense next chapter i think. but importantly, elliot and olivia were never partners. and yes, this being me, it is 1999!!! turn your pagers on!!

_of all the gin joints, in all the towns in the world, she had to walk into mine._

_-casablanca (1942)_

It’s almost been a year when he sees her. The sky has gone from grey to blue to grey again; his children have outgrown their clothes; the Greek diner where they used to meet in secret is out of business. 

There aren’t a lot of reasons to go into the city these days, but tonight he’s taken his wife to see a play at the Lincoln Center. _Marriage is work_ , says everybody. Marriage is work, he repeats to himself, as he sits through a standard performance of _Our Town_ , Kathy leaning forward in her seat and smiling through the sad scenes. Afterwards they wander around looking for a bar, and she slips her arm into his elbow and squeezes. 

People are out in herringbone coats and scarves, ladies with their heels clicking on the concrete, Christmas displays in windows and silver mimes on street-corners. Kathy says, “It’s nice doing something just us.” They’re swept along by the crowd, and if he can’t enjoy himself truly, at least he puts up a pretense. At the bar he goes to the counter to order while she holds a table. It’s dimly lit and the walls are covered with framed photographs from the good old days, boys in Yankee caps and celebrities who’ve died by now. Above the counter there’s a bright sprig of mistletoe, swung by a phantom breeze.

For a year he’s ached at the distance between himself and Olivia, has thought, more than once, that he’d cut his right hand off to let it be with her. But in the end they breathe the same air for minutes, minutes which might as well be hours, before he realizes she’s there. He turns his head and catches her mid-expression, that smirk, and if it’s possible for a memory to be etched in stone, then this one is. Her hair is longer than he remembers, brushing her bare shoulders and her velvet slip dress. In the instant before she moves he shivers, wondering what she’ll say or do—whether she’ll jump straight into his arms, have her way with him in front of God and his wife—or whether she’ll simply stand up, throw her drink in his face, and leave. 

Instead she smiles. She squeezes the bicep of the man she’s with and comes over, deliberately slow, he thinks, making him watch the sensuous movement of her legs under her dress, like moonlight on water.

“You,” she says, as if that’s his name. “Well, how’ve you been?” 

All the breath goes out of him at once. No, there won’t be a scene. It’s in her eyes—indifference—and compared to the tumult inside him, it feels like an insult. For the first time, he hates her. He wants to crush her heart like a fruit, he wants her to feel it. Is it fair? That hardly matters, does it, in love there is no fair, there are only moments of ecstasy and moments of terrible pain. Love for his children brought him closer to God, but this will send him straight to hell. 

“I’ve been great,” he says, forming the words cruelly. She keeps standing there, saying nothing, with only that mocking half-smile on her face. Someone touches his back. It’s his wife, whose mouth is a tight straight line.

“Elliot, you look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she says. 

“You must be Kathy,” Olivia interjects. “I’m Olivia Benson—I’m in Special Victims now. Elliot and I worked a case together awhile back. God, has it been a year now?”

“Almost,” he says, before the bartender comes up with his bourbon and Kathy’s martini. It’s cruel to extend this tête-à-tête, but still he doesn’t have it in him to send her away. He never did. But Kathy makes a polite response, and between the two of them, his wife and his former mistress, they reach some secretive womanly understanding, and Olivia turns away again. Kathy whisks him into the corner, where he drinks his bourbon and then another, glancing brazenly at Olivia and asking his wife to repeat herself several times, so that the evening is ruined, thoroughly ruined, and that’s before he sees Olivia lean over to her companion and throw her head back in laughter, the kind of beautiful abandon he used to see only in bed.


	2. first look

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i think it will take me a long time to get chapter 3 written due to the fact that i am employed but i hope you enjoy this update. remember when olivia was kind of a player and also made all her little jokes? just a gay surly detective and her gay little jokes? anyways that's the vibe i tried to curate here.

_she doesn’t know yet what a comet does  
you’re approaching even as you disappear_

_-Comet Song, Bright Eyes_

Munch won’t shut up about astronomy these days. Apparently there’s a History Channel series on the solar system that coincides with his bedtime. On a hunch she checks the tv guide at the newsstand and finds that the program airs at three in the morning, which, in tandem with his bleary eyes and irritability, convinces her that he’s been having the nightmares again. If there’s one thing she’s learned in Special Victims, it’s that nobody says anything about themselves directly. You want to find something out, you come at it sideways.

Today he tells her about Juliet’s Comet, which appears in the sky once in a lifetime. Once in a lifetime, in this case, is next month. A brief pause in depravity has kept them in the precinct all day, which should be a good thing, except it’s also freed them up to finish backlogged paperwork. Olivia’s head is swimming. It’s grim, she thinks, the way the old cases blur together. Around them the office buzzes with the usual mid-afternoon clamor, the copier whirring and someone in the cage singing Frank Sinatra. Luck be a lady, indeed.

She is not interested in comets, or in astronomy more generally, but this is the price of partnership. Munch does his best for her, too, handing her donuts after a hard case, or slipping theater tickets in her coat when there’s something good at The Public. 

“Juliet’s Comet, named, of course, after our ill-fated Shakespearean pre-pubescent,” he says, propping his feet up on his desk. “You know, they say it has highly unusual psychic powers. Reunites lovers, souls lost in the cosmic soup of space and time. Kind of neat, eh?”

“Thrilling,” she replies, half-frowning as she reviews a witness statement. “You still buying lunch?”

“Is that all I am to you? A steady meal?”

She fixes him with her nicest smile.

“John,” she says.

“Olivia,” he answers.

 _“Please?”_

“See, you _can_ pretend to be a lady when you want to,” he says, swiping her car keys off the desk. 

*

If he hadn’t left her alone that day, things might’ve turned out differently. She returns to this thought over and over again, in the mornings when she puts on her snow boots and walks restlessly around the city, the first light of dawn just breaking over the high-rises. _If Munch had been there._ It isn’t like her to rely so much on first impressions and chance. Then again everything she believed about herself has blurred over the past several months, like the melting edges of ice. She never used to dream in color and now it’s all she sees when she closes her eyes, the same violent blue come to swallow her whole, and each time, she welcomes it.

*

She hates paperwork and so she hasn’t gotten very far when she hears footsteps and says, “That was fast.” But when she looks up it isn’t Munch and an Italian sub, it’s Detective Stabler, empty-handed. 

In the photo hanging in Captain Cragen’s office, he’s solemn and serious in his dress blues. She’s studied it before with more than a little resentment. Stabler is a legend in the 55th precinct, for the Sixth Avenue Strangler case, for his closure rate, for the abruptness of his exit from SVU. On occasion Cragen still calls for him in the bullpen absentmindedly. She came to the unit eager to prove herself, and being a woman, a woman with her background, was enough baggage without competition from a predecessor’s ghost.

But he doesn’t look like a ghost now. In fact, Detective Stabler is almost unbelievably solid. He’s an average height, but something in the intensity of his stare and stance gives the impression of a larger man. His shirt-sleeves are rolled up and she notices the edge of a black tattoo before she draws her eyes back up to his face.

“You must be my replacement,” he says, scratching at the crook of his elbow like he noticed her staring. He looks younger when he smiles. 

“Benson. Nice to meet you, Detective Stabler.”

“Come on,” he says, setting his jacket on Munch’s desk and leaning against it familiarly. “SVU’s family, that makes us kissing cousins. I’m Elliot.”

She raises an eyebrow. He’s flirting, which she’s used to—practically expects, from these broad-shouldered Irish cops. But it’s a surprise coming from him. Still, she thinks, _what’s the harm,_ and maybe it’s the boredom of the afternoon, maybe it’s his forearms, maybe it’s the irrepressible gambler in her, but she leans back in her chair and flirts right back.

“I heard you were pretty good,” she announces.

Elliot grins. “Heard you’re better. Beat my closure rate in six months, is that right?” 

He says it like a compliment but also like a challenge. That pleases her, and she smiles at him for the first time. He stares openly.

It’s strange, how some looks can be hard and some can be soft and his can be both at once.

Cragen slams his office door and it’s as startling to Olivia as if he’d smashed a plate at their feet. If Elliot’s startled, he doesn’t show it. 

“Just the man I was hoping to see,” he says, breaking the tension and grabbing his jacket off the desk. Cragen gives her a nod as they head out together, walking side by side with the ease of old friends.

Elliot turns back to say: “Bye, Olivia. Nice to meet you.”

After a while, Munch gets back with her pastrami sandwich, neatly wrapped in white paper. He tosses the keys back at her and she catches them with her left hand, the right thoroughly occupied with the important business of eating. When she’s quiet and subdued that afternoon, he says this might be the first hour of peace he’s had since she got here, and could she please keep up the good work?

*

Cher comes on her television for a concert benefitting the whales, and this inspires her to call back the pretty, curly-haired ADA she slept with last June. They pick up where they left off. After the sex, which is above-average, the ADA asks to take her to dinner that weekend.

“Ah, I’m not really looking for a relationship right now,” Olivia says, belting her jeans decisively.

“Since when is dinner a relationship?” says the ADA, propped up on her elbow. 

She really is a lawyer.

*

They work four cases in three days. The ADA gives up on trying to reschedule dinner. And on the third day, Munch comes to wake her in the crib and she inadvertently punches him in the eye, giving him a nasty bruise and worse, something to make fun of her for forever. 

Finally she staggers home. She’s so tired she doesn’t even notice whether it’s day or night until she comes out of the subway, wrinkling her nose at the smell of rotting fruit, and looks up to see the comet. 

She leans against the side of a building for a minute. It’s blue, with a trail of soft light behind it like the train of bride’s dress. 

A different woman would make a wish. She’s not the type, but still, she’s never been able to see real beauty without taking a second look.

*

For a detective she doesn’t ask many questions. At work, of course, there are the strict necessities: _where were you, did you see anything suspicious, can anyone verify that?_ But in her personal life she’s more reserved. People are all the same, fundamentally, and if you let a silence linger for long enough, they’ll say anything to settle their unease. The trick is being the one who can hold out longer. 

Olivia excels at that. 

But Munch is peering into the vending machine, looking intensely between the Pop-Tart and the Snickers bar, when suddenly she finds herself asking, “Do you ever see your old partner?” 

“Elliot? Why, do you want to trade secrets with him about how to destroy me?”

She ignores this. On the opposite wall the clock is broken, stuck at 2:13 although it’s already evening. They’ve been grilling the same suspect for hours and every time she thinks they’re about to break him, Munch says the wrong thing, missteps she can hear as clearly as a skipped note in a piano chord. He’s a talented detective, a relentless canvasser with an eye for detail, but he doesn’t have her instinct for interrogation. Most days she doesn’t mind, but today there’s a strain behind her eyes and she feels the strange urge to take something apart, just to see if she can put it back together again.

“I just wondered how you two got along,” she says finally, leaning against the vending machine. Maybe it means something that she only thinks of Elliot when she’s miserable.

“Olivia, can’t you tell I’m concentrating?”

“You’re going to get the Pop-Tart, John, so what’s the point of wasting time?” she says, more forcefully than she intends. He gives her a strange look as he presses 475 for the Pop-Tart.

“I see Elliot. He’s still in the 55th, works Homicide. Trust me, you’re much nicer to look at.”

*

They work an awful case, three little boys molested by a priest, and she and Munch take turns making jabs at Catholics to make themselves feel better. Afterwards, when the priest is behind bars, and the three little boys are packed up and sent home, they get in his car and drive to a bar outside their usual three block radius.

“The ones with the kids are the worst,” he says, like a mantra.

“The ones with kids are the worst,” she repeats. 

At the bar she orders a scotch on the rocks and drums her fingers on the counter. It’s still early, and the bar is mostly empty, expectant. She hangs her blazer over her seat and listens vaguely as Munch explains the crucial role that dolphins played in World War II. The History Channel has moved on to military documentaries, she surmises.

“Elliot was asking about you,” he says after two drinks, snapping his fingers like it’s a memory he retrieved from one of the dustier corners of his mind.

Her jaw tightens. She rolls the glass between her fingers, hoping to appear nonchalant as she asks, “What’d you tell him?”

But then Jeffries and Briscoe show up, paged by Munch while she was in the bathroom. Behind them is the new kid, Cassidy, who stares at her when he thinks she isn’t looking. Her question is lost in the tumult of shrugged off jackets and protracted drink orders. 

At home that night she washes her dishes, which have accumulated into a small, sticky mountain, and stands at her window for several long minutes, watching the passerby on the street hurrying to their destinations, to their homes and families. The thing is, she isn’t sad. She works a demanding job, and parts of her life have been difficult, but then again, nothing so terrible has ever been done to her. She isn’t sad. She’s just struck sometimes by the notion that she isn’t quite where she’s supposed to be. 

*

The nightclub is covered in purple glitter. It’s all over the floor. On her pants, which are shiny patent leather, the glitter stands out like a star-studded sky. 

She’s drunk and as she tips her head back for a fifth shot of tequila, she feels for a moment like her head might roll right off her head. The music is loud, standard, a bass-heavy thudding that she can feel in her ribs. Beside her are several old friends, girls who are just now talking about taking a summer trip to Belize. Occasionally they pinch each other in the ribs to compare diets. Across the bar a dark-haired man makes eyes at her and she shoots him a reckless wave. She wasn’t planning on sex tonight, but she’s bored, and she’d like to make use of her body, the restless energy it always hums with. As a child she loved to play sports, although she quit them one by one as it became clear that for the other children, the sports were really a pretext for friendship, weekend ski trips and sleepovers that she was rarely invited to, once the parents caught wind of her mother. 

The stranger starts weaving his way towards her, and one of her girlfriends nudges her. “How does this always happen to you?” she says enviously. Olivia shrugs.

“Probably because I don’t want it to,” she says, a bit of honesty she might regret when the tequila wears off. But her friend smiles sweetly, and Olivia feels a twinge of guilt. Since she joined SVU her nights off are few and far between, and she’s started to regard her old circle with the same distant fondness you have for an apartment you’re about to leave. This should concern her, but what’s scarier is that it doesn’t. 

*

Suddenly Elliot’s everywhere. It occurs to her that it’s deliberate on his part, but more likely, she wasn’t looking for him before. One afternoon he even gives her a ride home. He’s ahead of her in line at the coffee cart, he’s jogging up the steps of the precinct, he’s around the corner at the courthouse, looking pissed and ready with a quip like, “What’s the difference between a vacuum cleaner and a lawyer riding a motorcycle? The vacuum cleaner has the dirtbag on the inside.”

“You like that one, Benson?” he says, punching her in the arm gently. He’s dressed up today, and his sparse hair looks strangely like someone tried to comb it. The wife, she decides.

“Mmm, not your best.” 

His face falls. “I give her all I’ve got and it ain’t good enough,” he grumbles to his partner, a dinosaur named McCracken who’s passed out on the courthouse bench.

“Yeah, well, try again next week.” she says, eyeing his biceps before she catches herself. He smirks, as if to say ‘I saw that.’ 

If he were a nice man, he’d let the moment pass.

“Next week?” he says archly, leaning in, so that he crowds her space with his brow and his smirk and his smell. 

No, he isn’t a nice man at all. But she holds her ground. Thinks _wife, wife, wife._

“Fly’s down,” she says demurely, and he looks. It isn’t, but she strolls away with the upper hand.

“Made ya look.”

*

The positive of working a consuming job is that it doesn’t leave space for what she is self-aware enough to acknowledge is a crush. She interrogates suspects, canvasses neighborhoods, watches for Captain Cragen’s approving nods. It’s not a simple Freudian case of regarding Cragen as a surrogate father, or at least, she hopes it isn’t. It’s just that she wants to be good. 

Not good: the best.

*

Munch comes in one morning and throws a newspaper on her desk. “Her work has already begun,” he says darkly.

“Who?”

“The comet.” 

With a skeptical look she draws the newspaper closer and sees it’s really more of a tabloid. On the front page is a razzy headline about a movie star who eloped over the weekend with the heir to a lighter fluid fortune, a man she met the very same day. “A Match Made in Heaven,” the headline proclaims.

“I don’t know where you come up with this stuff, Munch.” 

*

She has an actual lunch break for the first time in three months and she decides to climb up to the roof. Munch recommended her a book on the fall of Athenian democracy that’s actually pretty good, and earlier she stopped at the Italian market to buy a green salad in a clear plastic to-go box. The birds are out, flying from one tree to the next in a pack. It’s the kind of afternoon that reminds her that in spite of everything, she’s still young. 

She sits right on the ledge, with her legs swinging, which isn’t something Detective Benson does but is something Liv B. did, though the days of sneaking onto the roof of her high school are long behind her. She was a secretive, disinterested teenager, with few friends but a lot of people, boys and girls, who wanted to follow her up and kiss under the dwindling heat of evening.

Down on the street, she watches cars move through the busy street, occasionally punctuating the lunch-hour din with a honk. There’s a flower cart on the corner which she always considers buying from, a hot-dog man who has proposed marriage several times, and, just outside the precinct, there’s Elliot. He’s standing with his hands firmly on his hips, staring at something she can’t see. She feels a kind of thrill, watching him unobserved: every one of their interactions has been in public, hemmed in and circumscribed by the watchful, gossiping eyes of the office or the courtroom. This is distant, but entirely private.

As if on cue, he looks up and sees her. Even from this height, she can see the grin on his face as he waves.

Her mother used to tell her, “Olivia, you wouldn’t know a bad idea if it punched you in the face.”


End file.
